What Motivates Us?

KATHERINE BELL: Welcome to the Harvard Business Review IdeaCast. I’m Katherine Bell. I’m on the phone today with Daniel Pink, author of the New York Times Bestseller, A Whole New Mind. We’re going to be talking about his new book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. Dan, thanks for taking the time to talk to us.

DANIEL PINK: Katherine, it’s my pleasure.

KATHERINE BELL: So tell us, in a nutshell, what was most surprising that you found about what does motivate us?

DANIEL PINK: Well, I guess what surprised me the most was these kind of motivators that we take pretty much a given, that you know, if you reward something, you get more of that behavior, if you punish, you get less of it. That turns out to be not true in a surprisingly wide band of circumstances. These carrot and stick motivators, which are very, very good for certain things, actually aren’t very good for many, if not most things. And a lot of the research that I looked at in this book– and to write it, I looked at about 40 or 50 years of research in behavioral science– it really overturned a lot of my own preset notions about why we do what we do.

KATHERINE BELL: So has what motivates people changed, or do we just understand more about human motivation after the last 40 years or so of research?

DANIEL PINK: You know what, I think it’s a mix of both. That’s a really, really interesting question. Human beings, by the nature of their being human beings, are a mix of drives. So we have a biological drive. We eat when we’re hungry, we drink when thirsty. We have a reward and punishment drive, so we do respond very well to rewards and punishments in our environment. Then we have this third drive, that often gets neglected in business, where we do things because they’re interesting, because they’re fun, because we like them, because they contribute.

Now, I can bet those three drives have always been what constitutes being a human being, and I don’t think that people’s motivations have changed significantly, say, over the last 40 or 50 years. I think what has changed are a couple of things. Number one is that there’s now a very large body of research that gives us a much more calibrated, sophisticated understanding of how motivation works. The second thing is that, actually, I think what’s changed is not the motivation, but the type of work that people are doing.

So these characteristic motivators, these if-then rewards, they’re really good for simple, straightforward, rule-based, what we might think of as algorithmic tasks, where you’re just following a set of instructions. And that’s what a lot of Americans– a lot of people in the industrialized world– did for a living for very long time. I mean, a lot of work was about turning the same screw the same way over and over, and when that kind of work started fading away, a lot of work– a lot of white collar work– was in some ways simply adding up columns of figures over and over again. That is, it was intellectual work, but it was pretty routine, algorithmic kind of work.

And the truth is, what the science tells us is that for that kind of work, these carrot and stick, if-then motivators, they’re pretty good. They work pretty well. They don’t exactly ennoble the human spirit, but they’re fairly effective. The trouble is, is that for work that is non-routine, for work that isn’t algorithmic but is more conceptual, that requires big picture thinking, that requires a greater degree of creativity, that requires solving more complicated, complex challenges, the if-then motivators don’t work very well at all. And that’s not even a close call in the science. The behavioral science is very, very clear that– give people those kinds of motivators for creative, conceptual, complex tasks, and they will often underperform.

So I think that people have always had this mix of drives, that’s what it is to be human, so I don’t think that their motivations necessarily have changed. I think what’s changed though, is the work that people are doing requires in some ways, a different technology for motivating people to do it.

KATHERINE BELL: So you found that external rewards not only don’t work particularly well in most situations, in knowledge work especially, but sometimes they actually demotivate people and cause other problems as well. Why is that?

DANIEL PINK: Well, it’s tricky and it’s complicated, but there are a whole number of reasons. There are all kinds of downsides to these if-then motivators. For instance, if you give people a very high-stakes reward for achieving some kind of short-term goal, some people will take the low road there. Some people will cheat, that is inevitable. So that’s one big downside, is that if there’s a huge payoff for doing something, especially if it’s short term, some people are going to finagle the system. That is inevitable and we’ve seen that before.

The other thing I think is interesting, if you think about more creative, conceptual work, is that what those kinds of rewards do is they very much focus our mind, concentrate our mind, focus our gaze, direct our attention in a very tight way. And that’s actually really good for certain kinds of undertakings. So if you say to me, Katherine, Dan, I’ll give you $500 for doing something, you’ve got my attention. You’ve got it in a very focused way.

The trouble is, is that if you’re trying to do anything creative, trying to solve a complex, conceptual problem, that kind of narrow, straight-ahead focus doesn’t help, it actually hurts. So in some ways, these if-then motivators work poorly for creative, conceptual tasks, in part because they work so well for the more routine, algorithmic tasks. That is, for those, a concentrated gaze of narrow vision is actually really effective. For creative tasks, they’re less effective.

The other thing, which is a kind of an interesting phenomenon in the literature, is that sometimes adding a reward on top of something– that’s something that people inherently like– can actually make people less interested in the task. And so, for instance, if you think about something like open source. If you suddenly said, to some foundation or something, let’s start paying people who are contributing to open source, I actually think that would diminish participation in open source. Because I think what’s driving that participation is not the reward and punishment drive, but something more like the third drive, it’s about mastery, it’s about contributing, and so forth.

KATHERINE BELL: So how can organizations, and individual managers for that matter, increase the intrinsic motivation of the people who work for them?

DANIEL PINK: Well I think it’s important to recognize, again, that people are a mix of drives. And so it’s not in some ways a matter of either intrinsic or extrinsic– in fact, a lot of the research kind of begins to conflate those things– so I think what you have to do at a starting point, is you’ve got to pay people enough. If people aren’t getting paid enough, if they’re not being treated fairly, if they’re not being compensated adequately, there’s not going to be motivation. If people are worried, if they’re fearful, if they feel a sense of grievance or that they’re not being treated properly or that they’re not being paid fairly, what you’re going to have is you’re going to have people doing the minimum amount of work necessary to not get fired, and not a peppercorn more.

And so I think you got to pay people enough. I would argue, pay people more than enough. In a sense that, it’s a paradox, but one of the best uses of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table, so people aren’t focused on money, they’re focused on the work. Once you do that, it’s really a matter of tapping the things that the science shows lead to enduring performance, particularly for more complex tasks. And that’s a sense of autonomy, self-direction, the desire to get better and better at something that matters, you can call that mastery, and also purpose, that is, doing what we do in the service of something larger than oneself.

And there are actually a number of different things that individual managers can do. One of them actually comes directly from the pages of a Harvard Business Review, in the January issue. The great study of worker motivation that showed that the biggest motivator at work by far, by far– this is the work of Teresa Amabile at Harvard– was the sense of making progress. That is, making progress was the greatest motivator at work. Because people are seeking mastery, they’re speaking engagement, they’re seeking a chance to get better at something.

So on that, what managers can do is not develop elaborate incentive schemes, but help people recognize their progress, shine a light on that progress, recognize it in front of other people, celebrate that progress, help people stay on a path toward making progress.

I think there are all kinds of things that individual managers can do with regard to autonomy, too, and some of the most interesting examples are these almost radical forms of autonomy. So I write a little bit about this company Atlassian, the software company from Australia, that has these one-day– once a quarter, they tell the developers, go work on anything you want. Do it the way you want, do it with whomever you want, just show us what you’ve created at the end of the 24 hours. They call these things FedEx days, because you have to deliver something overnight. And these one-day bursts of autonomy have created this whole array of fixes for existing software, ideas for new products, that had otherwise never emerged.

And so I think that there are a lot of small, and not elaborate or expensive things, that individual managers can do. Kind of dial back the carrot and stick motivators, and infuse the workplace with a greater sense of autonomy, allow people to make progress, and animate what the people are doing with a greater sense of purpose.

KATHERINE BELL: So let’s say I haven’t been feeling very motivated at work recently, how would you advise me, as an individual person, to improve my own motivation?

DANIEL PINK: Well I think it’s a really important question, and it’s going to depend from individual to individual. I want to get a better sense of why you don’t feel motivated, and I think that that’s going to offer some hints about the remedy. So it could be that you’re demotivated because you’re not getting paid enough. That could be one thing. You could find out that people doing similar work in similar organizations are getting paid a lot more than you. That could be part of it.

You could feel like you’re stagnant, that you’re not making any kind of progress, that you’re doing the same thing over and over again and you’re not getting good at anything. It could be that you’re demotivated because you’re essentially being controlled by a boss. That is, you don’t have much freedom over your time, you don’t have much freedom over how you do what you do, you don’t have much freedom over what you do, you’re essentially complying with someone else’s orders, so that could be a big demotivator. I’ve heard this from many people, when they think about leaving organizations, I find it quite interesting, they say, I don’t feel like I’m making a contribution. That is, they feel like they’re working, but nothing’s happening. They’re not having any kind of effect on the external world.

So I think that, you know, if people are feeling demotivated– and truth be told, huge numbers of people are– I think it’s important to look at what is the source of that demotivation. What is the source of that? And think about, if you could change one thing, what would that be? And that’s going to give you some hints about the source of why you’re feeling demotivated, and that in turn could lead to some ways to re-sculpt your job, to provide a greater, deeper, more enduring sense of motivation. But I think in some cases– this is easier to do when labor markets are a little bit more robust– but in some cases, the solution to being demotivated at work is often to find a new workplace.

KATHERINE BELL: So have you found that the writing and the research you did for this book has changed your own work habits at all, or your approach to parenting?

DANIEL PINK: Well, I’ll take each of those separately. So on my own work habits, the research that I did on mastery has been really helpful for me. I mean, since I work for myself, I’ve always had a fair degree– or at least, since I’ve been working for myself– I’ve had fair degree of autonomy. The research that I did on mastery was really, really helpful to me, and one of the things that I discovered from that– there were a number of things I discovered from that– one of them really connected to this idea of making progress. And when I think about my own way of– days that are good, and days that aren’t good, it very much maps what was reported in HBR last month, which is the sense of making progress. And so that’s become very important to me.

I’ll give you two ways that I’ve put this into place. One of them is– what’s essentially key to mastery is a sense of feedback. And what I do, I get some feedback, but I don’t have a boss, and I barely even have colleagues many days. And so I get a lot of feedback from readers, which is awesome and really helpful, but I feel like I need to establish other kinds of feedback mechanisms. So what I’ve started doing is essentially a do it yourself performance review, where at the beginning of the month, I’ll set out what are the key things that I want to accomplish that month. Not only, you know, I want to write 4,000 words or so, but just sort of, what I want to learn, performance goals and learning goals. And then, at the end of the month, basically give myself a little review. Sort of forced myself into a practice, a habit, that allows me to harvest feedback, so force myself into a feedback. That’s been very, very useful.

The other thing, on that line of mastery, is if you look at some of the literature on habit formation, one of the things that you’ll find is that people don’t form new habits or make big changes in their life in an instant, except for the rare cases of individuals or organizations facing near-death experiences. But you know, in general, without an alarming near-death experience, most people make change in a slower, incremental way. And that’s fine, that ends up being more enduring. And so one of my favorite exercises is to ask myself, at the end of each day, was I better today than yesterday? Or was I a little better today than yesterday? And that is also, to me, a really helpful measure of whether I’m making progress.

And what I have found is that when I ask myself that question, was I better today than yesterday? Was I a little better today than yesterday? I have to say, many times the answer is no. But what I’ve also found is that the answer is rarely no two days in a row. That if I were to go to sleep tonight with the answer being no, I wasn’t any better today than I was yesterday, I’d probably be a little bit ticked off, and might wake up the following day with a little bit more resolve. So the work on mastery has been really helpful to me personally.

On parenting, you know, I got three kids, and I got to tell you, when you’re dealing with kids, carrots and sticks are a very, very, very, attractive option. They’re easy and they work in the short term. But I have really rethought that myself. I’ll give you an example of this. If you think about chores and you think about allowances. Two or three years ago, before I looked at this research, it seemed perfectly sensible to me that if you pay a kid an allowance for doing chores, and now I think that’s a bad idea. And the reason for that is that you end up mixing very different worlds. That is, the reason you do chores is because you have an obligation to your family. You’re part of a unit that has a common purpose, you have a responsibility to others whom you love, that’s why you do chores.

I think allowances are cool, too. Because you give your kid a little bit of money, and he or she will begin to understand the importance of money, and manage their money, and have some autonomy over spending and saving and so forth. I think that once you link the two, it gets very dangerous, because what you’ve done by linking chores to allowance, is you’ve said essentially, only a chump would set the table in this house if he or she weren’t getting paid. Only a chump would empty the garbage without getting paid. That doing chores around the house, helping out your family, is pretty much the same as working in a fast food restaurant. That only a real loser chump would do it without getting paid.

And I just don’t think that’s right. I think there are moral obligations, and I think there are economic transactions. So I think that chores are good, I think that allowances are good. I think combining them is bad. And that’s a big change. To me, that seems eminently sensible, in the way that linking the two seemed sensible to me before I looked at this research.

KATHERINE BELL: Dan, thanks so much for joining us today.

DANIEL PINK: My pleasure.

KATHERINE BELL: That was Daniel Pink, author of Drive. For more on motivating employees, go to HBR.org, and as always, send any feedback to Ideacast@hbr.org.